Chaos Theory (15 page)

‘That is a secret. A therapist never gives away her secrets.’

He kissed her forehead, and then he kissed her lips. ‘OK, Dr Fonselius, have it your way.’

But then she said, ‘A man from a circus taught me. He was Greek. But he was very hairy.’

Noah put his arm around her and held her. He watched the predatory bird nodding for a while and then his eyes closed and he slept. If he dreamed, he didn’t dream of Jenna.

 

E
arly the next morning, Noah was out on the terrace teaching Leon some stunt fighting moves.

‘In the movies, see, punches only
sound
real. Most of the time, the stuntmen miss each other by a mile, and the SFX are put in afterward. But even when they’re really grappling with each other, stuntmen are actually doing almost the exact the reverse of what it looks like they’re doing. They’re always taking care of each other and protecting each other from twisting their necks or straining their backs or hitting their heads.

‘You take the Atomic Knee, right, when a stuntman picks somebody up and slams his crotch down on to his knee. What happens is, the guy who looks as if he’s being lifted up actually
jumps
, and when he does come down, he makes sure that his feet hit the ground first. He grabs himself between the legs and staggers around in agony, but it only looks like his nuts have been pulverized.

‘It’s selling the move afterward. Looking like you’re badly hurt when you’re not. That’s the secret of being a really great stuntman.’

Silja came out with three mugs of coffee, wearing Noah’s black satin bathrobe with the embroidered dragon on the back, the one that he had been given when he was filming
Night of the Nineteen Ninjas
.

‘Leading Leon astray?’ she asked.

‘Teaching him some basic moves, that’s all. No reason why a graduate in Jewish Studies shouldn’t be able to do a Sunset Flip.’

‘So what are we going to be doing today?’ asked Silja.

‘Rick’s supposed to be calling me later, once he’s heard from his pal in the Secret Service. And Leon’s going to be surfing the Net. I’ll tell you what – I’d like to know some more about this professor of yours, Leon – Julius Halflife, or whatever his name is. When you think about it, he was just about the only person who knew that your dad was asking about those two medallions, wasn’t he?’

‘And you think, what?’ asked Silja. ‘That
he
has links with terrorists, and assassins? Some old Jewish university professor with a gammy leg?’

‘Who knows? Maybe he innocently mentioned it to somebody who innocently mentioned it to somebody else and in the end the wrong people got to hear about it. But it’s worth checking out, don’t you think?’

‘I suppose so, yes.’

 

After a half-hour of teaching Leon how to drop kick and stomp and fell his opponents with a flying elbow, Noah went into the house to take a shower.

Before he went into the bathroom he turned and looked at Leon out on the terrace. Leon was practising simulated punches and karate chops, and kicking at the chairs. ‘
Hah!
Hah!
Ahuga!
’ He had so much pent-up aggression. It would give him some relief to take it out on the furniture.

Silja was in the bedroom, sitting in front of the dressing table, brushing her hair. ‘You’re very good with him,’ she said. ‘He has so much anger.’

‘He’s not the only one.’

Silja turned around and looked at him with those icy-sky eyes. ‘In Finland, we learn to keep our anger inside ourselves, frozen, until it is time to thaw it out.’

‘Remind me not to upset you, then.’

 

Noah was still in the shower when he heard Silja shout out, ‘Noah! Noah, come quick!’

He turned off the faucet and listened. ‘Silja?’ he called. ‘Silja, what’s wrong?’

There was no answer, so he reached out for his big burgundy towel, wrapped it around his waist and went out into the kitchen. Through the open doors to the terrace, he could see Silja standing by the table, one hand raised.

‘Silja?’

She still didn’t answer so he went outside. At the far end of the terrace, next to the flagpole, were the spidery man with the small head and the blond man who had cut Jenna’s throat. The blond man was gripping Leon’s curly hair, and as the flag stirred in the morning breeze, Noah saw the sharp glint of an upraised knife. Leon was wide-eyed with panic.

‘Let him go!’ Noah barked. ‘Do you hear me, you murdering creep? Let him go!’

‘Bastards,’ croaked Noah’s parrot. ‘All of them. Bastards.’

‘Let him go?’ said the spidery man, stepping forward with a smile, although his eyes were concealed behind his sunglasses. ‘Why should we let him go? Not in our interests at all.’

‘He’s only a kid, let him go. He doesn’t have anything to do with any of this.’

‘Oh, really? You’ll have to let me be the judge of that.’

‘How the hell did you get in here?’

‘Through the front door, Mr Flynn. This young man was polite enough to open it for us, when we rang.’

‘It wasn’t his fault,’ said Silja. ‘They told him they were police, with news of his parents.’

Shit, I should have warned him, thought Noah.

‘Screw you,’ said his parrot.

The spidery man said, ‘You managed to escape from us last time, Mr Flynn, but you won’t escape from us now. It’s a pity that you’ve involved this innocent young man, as well as this beautiful young lady. But, well, you know what they say. No good crying over dying. Comes to all of us, sooner or later.’

‘Look, you can take me, but leave the kid alone,’ Noah urged.

‘Mr Flynn,’ smiled the spidery man, tugging at his knuckles, ‘you know as well as I do that confidentiality has to be absolute. We can’t take any risks at all. Now, let’s get this over with.’

The blond man pulled Leon’s head back, exposing his prominent Adam’s apple. As he did so, however, Silja suddenly started to run towards him – not run,
sprint
, so fast that the blond man reared backwards in alarm.

As Silja ran nearer, however, it became obvious that she wasn’t running directly towards him, but towards the terrace railing six or seven feet to his right. Even Noah couldn’t think what she was doing.
Don’t tell me she’s going to escape by throwing herself clear off the terrace. That’s a sixty-foot drop, through pine trees, down a steep rocky slope . . .

Silja jumped, and did a back spring, twisting herself sideways in mid-air. She grabbed the flagpole with both hands and swung herself right around in a semicircle, kicking the blond man square between the shoulders. He crashed down on to the terrace like a felled tree, and his knife skated across the polished oak floor.

Noah didn’t need any prompting. Stretching open his mouth and letting out his famous Noah Roar, he launched himself at the spidery man and gave him a Flying Elbow. Not the safe, harmless Flying Elbow that he had been teaching Leon – but a vicious slam in the middle of the chest with the bony angle of his arm. The spidery man was thrown back against the living-room window, and cracked his head on the wooden frame. His sunglasses went flying.

The blond man was trying to pull himself back up on to his knees, but Silja kicked him square in the back of the head, and he fell forwards again.

Noah seized the spidery man’s shirt front and banged his head against the window frame two or three times.

‘OK,’ he panted, ‘I want to know who you are, and I want to know who you work for, and I want to know exactly why you’ve been trying so goddamned hard to kill us.’

The spidery man looked up at him with concussed, unfocussed eyes, but said nothing. Noah reached down into the man’s belt and hoicked out his gun, a dull grey Ruger automatic. He also pulled up the legs of his pants to make sure that he wasn’t carrying any back-up weapons strapped to his ankles.

‘Come on,’ he repeated. ‘I want to know who you are, you toads, and I want to know
now
.’

The spidery man shook his head and coughed but still didn’t speak. Noah went across to the blond man, who was lying face down with Leon’s red-and-white baseball boot pressed against his left ear. He gave the man a heel kick in the side of the ribs, and then another, and then said, ‘How about you, scum? You killed my girlfriend right in front of my eyes. Any reason why I shouldn’t cut your nuts off and stuff them down your throat?’

‘Up yours, asshole,’ the blond man snarled back at him.

‘I think maybe now we should call the police,’ said Silja. ‘What are we going to do with them, otherwise? And if this is the man who killed your Jenna—’

‘Let me call Rick first, see what he says. Leon – want to go into the living room and bring me the phone?’

‘Sure thing,’ said Leon. But he was only halfway across the terrace when there was a deep, soft explosion, and a huge ball of dirty orange fire came rolling out of the living-room doors. Noah felt a wave of compressed heat, and raised his hand to shield his face.

Silja said, ‘My God! My God, what’s happened?’

‘Leon?’ shouted Noah, above the funnelling roar of the flames. ‘Leon, are you OK?’

Leon turned around, his face flushed with heat. ‘They had a briefcase,’ he gasped. ‘When they came in the door, one of them had a briefcase.’

There was another explosion, much louder this time. The living-room windows were blown across the terrace in a glittering shower of glass, and the flaming drapes were blown out after them, waving and burning like dragons’ tongues.

Noah gave the blond man another furious kick and looked round at the spidery man. ‘What the hell was that? What the
hell
did you do?’

The spidery man painfully climbed to his feet, holding on to a chair for support. Blood was sliding out of both nostrils and into his mouth. ‘Destroying the evidence, of course, Mr Flynn, once we’d disposed of you. Three unfortunate people burned beyond recognition in Laurel Canyon house conflagration. Pity it didn’t work out that way, but you don’t always get what you want.’

Noah’s house was now burning fiercely, with flames pouring out of every window and dark grey smoke teeming out from underneath the shingles.

‘I swear I’m going to kill you for this,’ said Noah. Everything that he and Jenna had built up together, every fabric that she had chosen, every drape that she had hung up, it was all whirling around him in a storm of black ashes.

‘You won’t kill me, Mr Flynn,’ said the spidery man, his voice barely audible over the popping and crackling of timber. ‘If I fail, there are others who will get to me first. But not you.’

Without warning, he turned and limped across the terrace, towards the railing. Before Noah could reach him, he had rolled himself over the top of it, and dropped down into the canyon. Noah glimpsed his grey-suited body bouncing and cartwheeling between the tree trunks. There was a faint crash of underbrush, and then he was gone.

‘
Noah!
’ shouted Silja – and, as he turned around, the blond man was struggling to his feet, violently pushing Leon to one side. Noah tried to block him off, but the blond man feinted and sidestepped, and dodged around to the far side of the dining table.

Noah pointed the Ruger at him and released the safety catch. ‘On your knees,’ he ordered him. ‘Hands behind your head.’

‘On my knees? What do you want me to do for you?’

‘I said, on your knees, you bastard!’

But the blond man ignored him, and took three surging strides towards the railing. He vaulted over it, his arms waving and his legs pedalling, and disappeared with a splintering of branches amongst the pines. Noah swung the gun after him but he didn’t shoot. He and Silja went to the railing and looked over. They could still hear branches breaking, but they couldn’t see the blond man at all.

‘Jesus,’ said Noah. ‘Even I wouldn’t try a stunt like that.’

There was another smaller explosion inside the house, and a bang as Noah’s pc imploded. Flames were beginning to lick up under the shingles now, and there was no question of them trying to put out the fire themselves. In the distance, they could hear the wailing and honking of fire trucks.

Noah looked down at the burgundy towel around his waist. ‘I’ll be ten seconds,’ he said. He took off the towel and quickly drenched it in water from the brass faucet at the side of the terrace. He splashed his body with water, too. Then he wrapped the towel around his head and ducked back into the house.

‘For God’s sake, be careful!’ called Silja.

‘Don’t worry! Done this a hundred times before!’

‘In a Nomex suit, not naked!’

It was fiercely hot inside the house, and filling with acrid smoke, but Noah kept low as he hurried along the corridor to the bedroom. He opened the door, went straight across to his closet and pulled out shirt, pants and shoes. He also went to the dressing table and collected his wristwatch, his wallet, his car keys and his cellphone.

Coughing, he scurried back out again. Silja looked at the red-and-purple Hawaiian shirt he had retrieved and said, ‘You nearly died for
that
?’

‘Come on,’ he told her. He went over to Marilyn’s perch and unchained the parrot’s leg. Marilyn flapped and squawked and protested, but he kept his grip on her. Then he led Silja and Leon around the side of the house to the parking area in front. They were just coming through the ivy-entangled gate when the first fire truck arrived, its lights flashing and its klaxon blasting.

Two firefighters dropped out of the fire truck and came hurrying towards them, their rubbers making a loud wobbling noise.

‘Anybody still in there?’

‘No, everybody’s safe.’

‘Anything else we should know about? Do you have any photographic chemicals in there? Any movie stock, anything explosive?’

Noah shook his head. ‘Only my entire life, that’s all.’